The Importance of Knowledge Environments and Spatial Relations for Organizational Learning: An Introduction
The birthplace of the field of organizational learning can be traced back to management scholars in the United States who were interested in organizational behavior. Over the years it has attracted researchers from diverse disciplines and from all around
- PDF / 175,550 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 48 Downloads / 178 Views
The Importance of Knowledge Environments and Spatial Relations for Organizational Learning: An Introduction Ariane Berthoin Antal, Peter Meusburger, and Laura Suarsana
The birthplace of the field of organizational learning can be traced back to management scholars in the United States who were interested in organizational behavior. Over the years it has attracted researchers from diverse disciplines and from all around the world. This line of inquiry is particularly apt to address the way interest in the field has spread and how it has been populated so far, given that the current edited volume is appearing in the series Knowledge and Space, an intellectual venture launched by the department of geography at Heidelberg University. The first book dedicated to organizational learning grew out of the collaborative relationship between Chris Argyris (Harvard University) and Don Schön (MIT) in Boston, Massachusetts. They published it in 1978 then revised it significantly in 1996, both times with the Massachusetts-based publisher Addison-Wesley. The year 1996 saw the appearance of two edited volumes (Cohen & Sproull, 1996; Moingeon & Edmondson, 1996), both of whose contents show that scholars from other parts of the United States as well as some Europeans had become engaged in the field. The internationalization appears to have started with visiting fellowships of U.S. scholars in Europe. In the 1970s the young Swede Bo Hedberg worked at the International Institute of Management of the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) in Germany with the American scholar Bill Starbuck, who was a senior fellow there, and one outcome was the landmark chapter on organizational unlearning (Hedberg, 1981) in the first volume of the Handbook of Organizational Design (Nystrom & Starbuck, 1981). Later, Europeans went to work in the United A. Berthoin Antal (*) Research Unit “Cultural Sources of Newness,” Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), Reichpietschufer 50, D-10785 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] P. Meusburger • L. Suarsana Department of Geography, Heidelberg University, Berliner Strasse 48, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] A. Berthoin Antal et al. (eds.), Learning Organizations: Extending the Field, Knowledge and Space 6, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7220-5_1, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
1
2
A. Berthoin Antal et al.
States. In the 1990s the French scholar Bertrand Moingeon became involved in the field while he was at Harvard with Chris Argyris and Amy Edmondson, a working relationship that grew into a coeditorship (Moingeon & Edmondson). Another landmark book in the field came from Japan. Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi shifted the discussion both geographically and conceptually by drawing on experiences in Japanese organizations and by introducing “the SECI1 model of knowledge creation” as a different way of framing processes of learning in organizations (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). In 2006 three
Data Loading...
